ALL POSTS
Kim Longinotto, Rose McGowan, and Erika Cohn Ink Deals at Sundance
Sundance 2015 is just getting underway, but there’s already a lot of exciting news coming in for female directors, novices and vets alike. Yesterday, the opening day of the festival, brought word...
Sundance Women Directors: Meet Alexandra Shiva — ‘How to Dance in Ohio’
Alexandra Shiva is the founder of Gidalya Pictures, a Manhattan-based documentary production company. Shiva produced and directed Bombay Eunuch in 2001, which went on to win Best Documentary Feature...
Katniss Headlines the Highest-Grossing Film Two Years in a Row
Hunger Games fans, rejoice: Jennifer Lawrence’s Katniss Everdeen has dominated the box office once again. Mockingjay — Part 1 has surpassed Guardians of the Galaxy at the box office,...
Sundance Women Directors: Meet Rania Attieh — ‘H.’
Rania Attieh & her H. co-director Daniel Garcia were named the 2015 Independent Spirit Awards’ “Someone to Watch.” Included among the “25 Faces of Independent Film” by Filmmakers...
Trailer Watch: Ellie Kemper Flees a Doomsday Cult in Tina Fey’s ‘Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt’
Sundance Women Directors: Meet Erika Cohn — ‘In Football We Trust’
Erika Cohn is a DGA award-winning filmmaker with a diverse background in the arts and a passion for documentary photography. (Kickstarter)Co-directed by Tony Vainaku, In Football We Trust will...
‘A Path Appears’: Finding Hope and Horror While Uncovering Stories of Global Gender Oppression
‘Song One’ Director Kate Barker-Froyland on Rewriting Her Script for Anne Hathaway, Being Typecast as a “Woman Director”
Song One begins with anthropology grad student Franny (Anne Hathaway) immersed in Moroccan culture. We witness her carefully observing local rituals and taking meticulous notes. The drama chronicles...
SF Film Society Introduces New Fellowship for Female Filmmakers
If you’re a regular reader of Women and Hollywood’s interviews, there’s a good chance you’ve noticed that a significant number of female filmmakers have shared that securing funding for...
Tony Award Winner Anika Noni Rose Gets into Producing
You may recognize Anika Noni Rose from the stage (she won a Tony for her performance in Caroline, Or Change), TV (The Good Wife, Private Practice), or the big screen (Dreamgirls). The multi-talented...
Sundance Women Directors: Meet Kim Farrant — ‘Strangerland’
Kim Farrant’s Naked on the Inside sold to major networks worldwide and her award winning short films The Secret Side of Me, Alias, Sammy Blue, Beloved and Bombshell have screened at Cannes, New...
Trailer Watch: How College Campuses Became ‘The Hunting Ground’ for Rapists
The first trailer has arrived for The Hunting Ground, and it is heartbreaking and frustrating, which is to be expected given its subject matter: the ubiquity of sexual assault on U.S. campuses and...
Sundance Women Directors: Meet Mor Loushy — ‘Censored Voices’
Mor Loushy graduated from the Sam Spiegel Film and Television School in 2007 and has been working as a freelancer ever since. Her debut film, Israel Ltd., world-premiered at IDFA 2009 and has been...
Guest Post: Earning My Invitation into the Highly Secretive, Male-Dominated Fraternity of Magicians
Ricky Jay, the subject of my American Mastersdocumentary DeceptivePractice (premieres Friday, January23 at 9 PM on PBS), told me that the field of sleight of hand is one of theworld’s few true...
Slamdance Women Directors: Meet Esra Saydam and Nisan Dag — ‘Across the Sea’
Esra Saydam is an award-winning filmmaker born and raised in Istanbul who later moved to the US for her filmmaking career. She directed two shorts that screened at festivals such as the Seattle FF...
Anne Hathaway and Julie Taymor Team Up for Play About Female Fighter Pilot
After winning an Oscar for playing the doomed Fantine in Les Misérables two years ago, Anne Hathaway will delve even deeper into her theatre roots by starring in Grounded, a one-woman play about a...
Slamdance Women Directors: Meet Dana Nachman — ‘Batkid Begins’
Born and raised in New York, writer/director Dana Nachman’s films — Witch Hunt (2008), Love Hate Love (2011), and The Human Experiment (2015) — have premiered and screened at the...
Watch: First Clip from Liz Garbus’ Nina Simone Documentary
Sundance Women Directors: Meet Anna Boden — ‘Mississippi Grind’
The first feature from the filmmaking team of Ryan Fleck & Anna Boden was Half Nelson, which world-premiered at the Sundance Film Festival before going on to win numerous prizes. Half Nelson was...
The Big O: Ava DuVernay’s Sisterhood of Un-Nominated Women Directors — and How They’ve Fared Since
As the country celebrated Martin Luther King, Jr. Day this week, it was difficult not to think about what could have been when the nominations for the 87th Academy Awards were announced last...
Sundance Women Directors: Meet Leslye Headland — ‘Sleeping with Other People’
Leslye Headland started her writing career in theater, with such plays as Bachelorette (Second Stage), Assistance (Playwrights Horizons), and the rest of the “Seven Deadly Plays” series (IAMA...
Sundance Women Directors: Meet Louise Osmond — ‘Dark Horse’
Director Louise Osmond started her career at the UK network ITN in their news journalism graduate trainee program, covering stories in Europe and Africa before moving into documentaries. Her most...
16% of Berlinale 2015’s Films in Competition Directed by Women
Of the 19 films that will compete for the Golden and Silver Bears at the Berlin International Film Festival this year, only 3 will be directed by women, comprising a scanty 16% of the Berlinale’s...
Sundance 2015: The Films We Can’t Wait to See
As we reported back in December, ninewomen-directed narrative and documentary features (out of a total of 29premieres) will make their debuts at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. 36%, or more...
Sundance Women Directors: Meet Ilinca Calugareanu — ‘Chuck Norris vs Communism’
Ilinca Călugăreanu is a freelance documentary filmmaker and editor based in London with a background in anthropology. As she describes herself, “I moved towards filmmaking whilst exploring the...
Guest Post: ‘It Happened Here’: Documenting Rape Culture on College Campuses
I’ve been adocumentary filmmaker for over 40 years, and in that span I have crafted film on topicsas diverse as the Barbie doll, the New York Mets, restorative justice, breastcancer, and people...
Margaret Nagle to Receive WGA Award for ‘The Good Lie’ Script
Margaret Nagle (Boardwalk Empire, The Red Band Society) will receive the Writers Guild of America’s 2015 Paul Selvin Award for her The Good Lie screenplay. Named after the WGA’s late general...
Jennifer Lawrence in Talks to Star as Diver Audrey Mestre
Sundance Women Directors: Meet Friday Barkfors — ‘Pervert Park’
Sundance Women Directors: Meet Chai Vasarhelyi — ‘Meru’
(Elizabeth) Chai Vasarhelyi is an award-winning film director and producer with Hungarian, Chinese, and Brazilian roots. Her first film, A Normal Life, about young Kosovars who came of age during...
Two Weeks to Go Until the 2015 Athena Film Festival (New Poster)
There’s just two weeks left until the launch of the 5th annual Athena Film Festival, which will run at the Barnard College campus in Manhattan from February 5–8, 2015. This year, Jodie Foster...
Chart: The Higher You Go in Hollywood, the Harder Women Directors Are to Find
We all know the woeful statistics about women directors, but a new graphic from FiveThirtyEight illustrates just how the deck is stacked against female filmmakers, especially at the studio and...
Sundance Women Directors: Meet Shari Springer Berman — ‘Ten Thousand Saints’
Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini are an Oscar-nominated and Emmy-winning filmmaking team well recognized for their innovative body of work, which blends an affection for idiosyncratic,...
Guest Post: #OscarSoWhite Includes the Documentary Category, Too
The 2015 Oscarnominations upset many people. When the Academy nominated the highlyregarded film Selma for Best Picture but snubbed its African-American femaledirector, Ava DuVernay, publications as...
Sundance Women Directors: Meet Anne Sewitsky — ‘Homesick’
Sundance winner Anne Sewitsky studied directing at the Norwegian Film School. She has directed several features and high-end television dramas. Homesick will be Sewitsky’s third feature, and the...
Spring 2015 Theatre Preview: Women on Broadway
Broadway can be a disheartening place forwomen. Too few are represented as writers and directors, and women’s stories don’toften make it to the stage. The previous 2013–2014 season did not...
Sundance Women Directors: Meet Jean Carlomusto — ‘Larry Kramer in Love and Anger’
Jean Carlomusto’s documentaries have been exhibited internationally in festivals, museums, and on television. She produced, directed, and edited Sex in an Epidemic, which premiered on Showtime....
Sundance Women Directors: Meet Nikole Beckwith — ‘Stockholm, Pennsylvania’
Nikole Beckwith’s plays have been read and performed in Ensemble Studio Theater, LAByrinth Theater Company, The Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, Barrow Street Theater, 3LD, The Flea, Lesser...
Sundance Women Directors: Meet Liz Garbus — ‘What Happened, Miss Simone?’
Academy Award-nominated director/producer Liz Garbus co-founded Moxie Firecracker, Inc., an independent documentary production company, with filmmaker Rory Kennedy in 1998. Her directorial credits...
TCA 2015 Update: New TV Deals With Eva Longoria, Dolly Parton, and Pamela Adlon
If the 2015 TCAs are anything to go by, TV continues to increase diversity, experiment with form, and welcome women over 35. Cases in point: Eva Longoria, Dolly Parton, and Pamela Adlon will take...
Sundance Women Directors: Meet Alanté Kavaïté — ‘The Summer of Sangaile’
Born in Lithuania, Alanté Kavaïté studied Beaux Arts in Avignon and in Paris, where she specialized in photography and video. Her first feature film, Ecoute le Temps (Fissures), was released in...
Angelina Jolie’s ‘Unbroken’ is the Sleeper Hit No One’s Talking About
Angelina Jolie may not have wowed critics with Unbroken, but she’s certainly proven herself a director to watch with her true-life survival tale. After collecting another $4.2 million at the box...
Academy Awards President Cheryl Boone Isaacs Responds to ‘Selma’ Snub; Ava DuVernay Sends MLK Day Message
Last week, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) once again disabused the notion that the Oscars have anything to do with merit by nominating Selma in just two categories, Best...
Quote of the Day: George Lucas on Hollywood’s Lack of Movies for Girls
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Women Writers Excluded From the Original ‘Odd Couple’
While we’re still nursing our wounds about the snubbing of Selma director Ava DuVernay by the Academy Awards, here’s a rare story of actual feminist triumph in the showbiz world that might cheer...
Weekly Update for January 16: Women Centric, Directed and Written Films Playing Near You
Films About Women Opening This Week Appropriate Behavior — Written and Directed by Desiree Akhavan For Shirin (Desiree Akhavan), being part of a perfect Persian family isn’t easy....
Charlize Theron Developing Women-Centric TV Shows in New Production Deal
Charlize Theron’s name isn’t exactly synonymous with TV (though the Oscar-winning actress can boast an unforgettable guest arc sending up the manic pixie dream girl trope in Arrested...
Trailer Watch: A Pussycat Urges to Kill! Kill! in Marjane Satrapi’s ‘The Voices’
Alexandra Shiva’s Autism Coming-of-Age Doc ‘How to Dance in Ohio’ Acquired by HBO
How to Dance in Ohio Featurette – Meet the Artists – Trailer Addict
Women Made Up 15% of the Protagonists in the Top 250 Grossing Films in 2014
A warning: if you’re still reeling from the profoundly disappointing news that 100% of this year’s eight Oscar-nominated feature films are about men, this post is likely to make you even more...
‘The Fall’ is a Serial Killer Drama with a Feminist Twist
The second season of The Fall premieres on Netflix today, and if you haven’t watched this BBC drama yet, now’s a good time to start. (The first season’s only five episodes long, so you’ll be...